A telephone rings. A telephone for the hearing impaired flashes a bright light. In these examples, the audible ring or visual flash of light indicate to the telephone user that a call has been received. To communicate with the caller, the telephone user must answer the phone, perhaps by picking up the handset. Without the audible ring, the visual flash of light, or some other indication that a call has been received, the telephone user would not know to answer the call and the opportunity for communication with the caller would be lost. Consequently, an indication that an incoming call has been received is a necessary element in telephonic and other types of communications.
Mobile telephones and other wireless devices generally arrive in the hands of users preconfigured with a particular means of indicating an incoming call. A typical device will produce an audible ring tone. Many of these devices also provide the user with the ability to select an alternate means of indicating that an incoming call has been received. The user may be able to select from a variety of ring tones, inaudible indicators such as vibrations or visual indicators, or other indicators. Some users may be able to purchase and download additional ring tones and other indicators for use with their devices. These downloaded call indicators can typically be stored on the device, allowing the user to reconfigure the device to use the downloaded ring tone or other incoming call indicator at a later time.
Some wireless devices are configurable to select a particular ring tone or other incoming call indicator for a particular incoming caller. For example, an incoming call from Caller A may be announced with Ring Tone A, an incoming call from Caller B may be announced with Ring Tone B, while an incoming call from an unknown caller may be announced with Ring Tone C. In this example, once the user configures the device to indicate an incoming call from Caller A with Ring Tone A, Ring Tone A will always announce Caller A until the user reconfigures the device to provide a different incoming call indicator for Caller A.